WELCOME TO RED HILL CAMP.

Well in my time, as a little girl, I came here with my grandparents who were doing domestic work for people around here, for the elite. We'd come with the horse and sulky from Yass. We’d camp here 'cause there's a creek running down there from the Grammar School. We'd take our horse Poppy down to the creek and she would have a drink and wander around.

That's what people wanted in them days, somewhere where you could always have a drink of water. And of course the Molonglo River (now Lake Burley Griffin) wasn't far from here. In them days, there was an abundance of food on the Molonglo, shellfish, lots of fish, cod, crabs and ducks.

- Aunty Matilda House, Ngambri-Ngunnawal

The Red Hill CampCommunity Archaeology Project was a student-led research project undertaken in Canberra in 2015-17. It was a collaboration between students at the Australian National University and Canberra's local Traditional Custodian groups. This legacy site provides access to the research findings and publications. All information on this site is covered by a Creative Commons non-commercial share-alike license. This site is maintained by Canberra based heritage consultancy Action Heritage.

Red Hill Camp is colloquially known as the ‘last campsite of the Ngunnawal’. The site is listed in the ACT Heritage Register for its association with the life of Ngunnawal-Ngambri Elder Aunty Matilda House.

Today, Red Hill Camp is a small, non-descript park in the inner-city suburb of Griffith, within a couple of kilometres of Parliament House. In the 1940s, Matilda camped in this park with her brother Arnold and her grandparents Cissy and Lightning Williams. They worked at the old Narrabundah Homestead (now Endeavour Street).

The park and surrounding suburb was built in the 1920s after Canberra was announced as Australia’s capital. However, it is likely that Aboriginal people were camping along the nearby creekline a long time before European colonisation of the Limestone Plains.

Red Hill Camp must be seen in the context of the wider cultural landscape of Ngunnawal Country. This one small camp is representative of the broader network of campsites and pathways that local Aboriginal families used to live and work on their Country up until the present day. Rivers and creeks were important food sources across Australia and were often used as pathways by Indigenous people.